I went to an average state comprehensive school. When the teachers really got to the end of their rope there would be group punishment. I vividly remember being kept late one Friday because a classmate had stolen the keys to my (recently qualified) geography teacher’s car. This presented quite a problem for her getting home, and so we were all kept back until the culprit confessed or was given up by the class.
As the minutes ticked by, the injustice of the situation really made me angry. I’d spent the lesson working and so had missed which of the four class clowns was responsible this time. The tension built and the anger became quite a palpable shared experience. It wasn’t directed at the culprit but at the teacher for what was seen as a large and unfair abuse of power. All most of us had done was work diligently for an hour and we were now being punished because we could not rat out the baddie within our ranks. I suppose the idea was that the culprit would ultimately be overcome by the guilt of inconveniencing his classmates and confess. It never worked.
This is how I am beginning to feel about air travel. I loved travelling when I was younger, especially the variety and potential of airports. I still find something very exciting about the idea that you can go into these huge buildings with some money and a passport and in a matter of hours you can be almost anywhere else in the world. Travel writers have nominated budget airlines as bearing responsibility for sapping the glamour from air travel, but I disagree. Ryanair in particular facilitated a lot of my exploration of Europe in my late teens, disappearing over long weekends to Eastern Europe with a tent and a wallet full of dollars. I was never really fixated on the flight, just the departing and arriving. I think this greater airborne mobility is a good thing, even if we have lost the free in-flight bar, as it gets us to new places and exploring new cultures.
Airport security after the attempted liquid bombings has tested my patience over the last few years. I remember a mad dash back though a terminal after I had stupidly wrapped a very well sealed bottle of cognac in a carry-on bag (though many thanks to Spanish security who understood why the plane would go without me before I left it behind). I hate queuing for things, I hate my stuff being pawed by strangers and since school, I have always hated being made to feel guilty by association or punished because of the actions of others. Yes, air travel should be safe, but it should also be reasonably convenient, or I will set my travel ambitions closer to home, and businesses will (finally) properly implement the sort of IT systems that makes travel redundant as they cannot afford to have their employees lose half a day to airport security.
Rob’s Blog has another valid perspective, and he is quite right – these scanners were tested and side-lined because public reaction was so negative just a few months ago. They won’t be any less oppressive three weeks from now.
I remember the same thing at my school and had the same reaction. It may even have shaped my political views…